facade
The face of a building, especially the front view or elevation.
Noun
- The face of a building, especially the front view or elevation.
- In Egypt the façades of their rock-cut tombs were[…]ornamented so simply and unobtrusively as rather to belie than to announce their internal magnificence. - 1865, James Fergusson, A History of Architecture in All...
- Like so many of the finest churches, [the cathedral of Siena] was furnished with a plain substantial front wall, intended to serve as the backing and support of an ornamental façade. - 1880, Charles Eliot Norton,...
- The house of Ruthven was a small but ultra-modern limestone affair, between Madison and Fifth ;[…]. As a matter of fact its narrow ornate façade presented not a single quiet space that the eyes might rest on after a...
- The face or front (most visible side) of any other thing, such as the prospect of an organ.
- A deceptive or insincere outward appearance.
Synonyms: appearance cover front guise pretence
- An object serving as a simplified interface to a larger body of code, as in the facade pattern.
- Facades are widely used for tasks like simplifying complex APIs. - 2017, Evan Burchard, Refactoring JavaScript: Turning Bad Code Into Good Code, O'Reilly Media, →ISBN, page 311:
Origin
Borrowed from French façade, from Italian facciata, a derivation of faccia (“front”), from Latin faciēs (“face”); compare face.
Forms
Derived
counterfacade facadal facadectomy facaded facade pattern facading facadism
Verb
- To cover or disguise an outward appearance.
- Una was not happy in that small and self-immured company, already bound together by its big year on Broadway. But she façaded her unrest with a determination to improve her mind. - 1943, Arthur Stringer, Star in a Mist,...
- The parks observed at the entrance, with their fountains and benches and circular drives, were no "Potemkin's villages" facading the lanscape for official visits. - 1960, Press and Information Office, Embassy of the...
- In fantasy he facades a happy childhood, but in reality it was extremely lonely, and it would appear that he had probably been breast fed through a pair of falsies. - 1980, LA Law Library, California, Court of Appeal...